An anonymous reader writes: The German parliament is set to discuss a controversial online copyright bill that is meant to allow news publishers to charge search engines such as Google for reproducing short snippets from their articles.

Earlier this week, Google started a campaign against the proposed law.

Google was criticized for its campaign against the law. The search engine "obviously" tries to use its own users for lobbying interests "under the pretext of a so-called project for the freedom of the Internet", wrote Günter Krings and Ansgar Heveling, politicians of the CDU and CSU conservative parties, who together form the biggest block in the German parliament.

But Max Planck scholars said, overall, the proposed law is not well thought through, and it can not be justified by any substantive argument. And since not even the publishers unanimously agree on the necessity of the bill and a similar proposal was almost unanimously canceled by politicians 2010, any basis necessary to adopt the proposed rule is lacking, they wrote.

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